Conventionally, in digital appliances equipped with image input capabilities, such as camera-equipped mobile phones and smartphones (high-functionality mobile phones), there are commonly used, as image sensors for converting an optical image formed by an imaging lens into an electrical signal, silicon semiconductor devices (e.g., CCD (charge-coupled device) image sensors and CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) image sensors). Silicon semiconductor devices are sensitive up to a near-infrared region; thus, when light is incident on them, they capture not only visible light but also near-infrared light as an image. This leads to problems such as pseudocolors in the taken image. This is coped with, in conventional digital appliances equipped with image input capabilities, by inserting an infrared-cut filter between the imaging lens and the image sensor.
Various types of infrared-cut filers have conventionally been proposed. For example, Patent Document 1 identified below proposes, as an infrared-cut filter for use in cameras, one in which two infrared-absorptive glass substrates are bonded together with an infrared-cut layer laid in between. Such optical filters for use in cameras are required to be increasingly slim as cameras are given increasingly low profiles. However, absorptive glass cannot be made thinner than a certain thickness; to make it thinner requires a filter that relies on interference or the like rather than absorption. Inconveniently, a thin glass substrate is liable to break, warp, or otherwise degrade.
As an optical filter less liable to warp, for example, Patent Document 2 identified below proposes one in which, on opposite sides of an extremely thin substrate, dielectric multi-layer films are respectively formed which have a symmetrical structure with respect to the substrate with a view to reducing the warp resulting from film stress. For other examples, Patent Document 3 identified below proposes an optical thin film in which the difference between the numbers of layers stacked in the multi-layer films on opposite sides is controlled to be equal to or smaller than a predetermined value so as to cancel out film stress with a view to reducing the warp, and Patent Document 4 identified below proposes a multi-layer film filter in which a multi-layer film deposited by multi-layer film sputtering has a stress in a range of ±100 MPa or less.